How Alibaba Views International Expansion and Mobile: A Discussion With Joe Tsai

There’s likely no company in the global Internet space today that’s got people talking more than China’s Alibaba Group.

Image by None via CrunchBase

Sometimes called a combination of
eBay, Amazon, and PayPal, it’s got much bigger ambitions than that.

Yahoo! and
Softbank are big owners of Alibaba’s shares and have seen their stock prices rise over the last year as Alibaba’s perceived value has increased. It would have been hard for anyone to predict Alibaba would grow to become such a force when it was founded in 1999 by Jack Ma, a former English teacher, in his apartment.

One man who was with Jack from the beginning was Joe Tsai. Alibaba’s longtime CFO, Joe recently moved up to Vice Chairman of the group and is actively involved in the group’s recent strategic investments.

I spoke to him recently about Alibaba’s international expansion plans and how it’s adapting its e-commerce platform for the mobile age we now live in.

1. Up until now, most Americans think about Alibaba Group as a Chinese-focused company. What are your thoughts on international expansion for the group?

We have spent a lot of time thinking about international.

We think of international by what we can do in a cross-border context. It’s one thing to think of exporting from China, which is what we have done a lot to date. But it’s another to situate ourselves in other countries. We’re just starting to do that.

We’ve always had a cross-border B2B business.

We also have AliExpress which is growing and scaling nicely. The concept for AliExpress is to bring Chinese manufacturers online and make a global B2C marketplace. eBay has done a cross-border marketplace well. AliExpress focuses on consumer markets in developing countries. For example, we are the largest e-commerce site in Russia. We are also looking a lot at South America right now.

Image by None via CrunchBase

The next cross-border opportunity: there are millions of overseas Chinese in North America, Europe and Australia. They all want to buy from Taobao. How do we bring them back? Every overseas Chinese consumer is like 3-4 native Chinese consumers in terms of purchasing power. There’s no language problem with them coming to our website, but we have to work on payment and logistics.

And on the flipside, we want to bring hundreds of millions Chinese to shop in the United States. This is something which American merchants get excited about. With AliPay, we can enable Chinese consumers sitting in their home country to shop on, say, Saks Fifth Avenue, pay us in RMB, and we make sure merchants get the currency of their choice and handle logistics.

For us, international means starting with the cross-border opportunity. By analogy, if you look at how Facebook has grown in different countries, they started with cross-border as well. Facebook early adopters in foreign countries were all friends with people in the US. That’s how they built a critical mass of Brazilian early adopters who had friends in the US. Later on, those early adopters pulled in other Brazilians to the platform and Facebook suddenly hit critical mass around the world.

2. Recently, Alibaba made key investments in Sina Weibo, AutoNavi, and ShopRunner in the US. Tencent is rumored to be making an investment in Snapchat and has been seeing great success with WeChat. Baidu has bought 91 Wireless. The online video space is extremely hot right now in China. How does Alibaba think about taking your core e-commerce services to mobile and dealing with such threats as the proliferation of Android and messaging platforms?

E-commerce is one segment that’s perhaps the most complex when it comes to mobile. You not only have to deal with browsing and selection but logistics and payment, which implies issues of reliability and security. Mobile adoption in e-commerce is a lot slower than in other consumer Internet verticals. For example 50% of GMV on Amazon and eBay is not from mobile. It’s more like 15%-20% – even though in the social networking context, like facebook, more than 50% of the users access the service from mobile devices. Today, we are seeing high teens mobile penetration from mobile GMV in China.

We could sit here and be complacent about the rise of mobile because Taobao and Tmall have very good positions having captured large shares in mobile commerce, but we’re feeling the opposite. We’re seeing the future and we feel a strong sense of urgency when it comes to mobile.

Mobile commerce could really disrupt the traditional marketplaces in the PC environment. In mobile, there’s not a lot of screen room. E-commerce marketplaces are conducive to larger screens. People want to save time on a mobile small screen. Therefore, the whole model could be disruptive.

So, with mobile, we are shifting from a model of pulling users to pushing messages out to users. Ebay’s web site is a destination. That’s pull. In contract, mobile enables every merchant to push whatever message to a huge audience.

Because of the disruptive elements of mobile, we’re not standing still. We have to move out of our comfort zone of e-commerce. We have to be more eclectic. While the Taobao app is already one of the most popular apps in China with hundreds of millions mobile users, you will see us doing our own messaging platform. We have something competitive to WeChat. It has a lot to do with e-commerce, if you make it large enough. Within the Taobao app we also have a “mini-app” that enable merchants to stay connected to their customers who subscribe to get feeds. This is a very good tool for merchants to retain their existing customers, which lowers their cost of churn and ultimately lowers their cost of having to acquire new customers to replace the churn.

We’re also doing an operating system for smartphones. The core strategy is to give users an experience that connects their hardware device to content and services in the cloud. It’s an alternative to Android where an Android device is isolated from cloud-based services.

In mobile, the boundaries between e-commerce, communications, social networking, etc., become blurred.

Sina Weibo, often known as the Twitter of China, is a way for merchants who have Taobao store-fronts to stay in touch with their customers and for consumers to share what they like on Taobao, and that’s in part what drove our strategic investment in Weibo. AutoNavi is not just a provider of navigation and map services. They have one of the most popular “local services” apps in China that enable users to find restaurants and entertainment based on their locations. Local services will play a big role in e-commerce in the future.

We will continue to find all kinds of new ways to reach our users in ways that best suit this new mobile environment we operate in.

Thanks, Joe.

[Eric Jackson was long Yahoo and Softbank at the time of this interview.]

I'm a tech and media investor. I did a Ph.D. in Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York, with a specialization in Strategic Management. You can follow me on Twitter @ericjackson, subscribe to me on Facebook, follow me on Sina Weibo, or C...